


Appealingly Boring

by Zweelee



Category: Kakos Industries (Podcast)
Genre: Cerebral sex, Corin has a problem, Corin is a nerd, Corin's problem is a giant penis (again), Gen, Helena Is Not Amused, Other, boring is the new sexy, nothing graphic happens, the Division of Increasingly Improbable Slash Fiction, the Division of Incredibly Boring Things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2019-01-06 02:44:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12202296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zweelee/pseuds/Zweelee
Summary: There was a stack of paper on his desk. Quick examination revealed a pleasant surprise: it was a delivery from his favourite division, the Division of Incredibly Boring Things. A weighty dissertation on the topic “Comprehensive Analysis of the Factors Influencing the Spatial Distribution of Darjeeling Tea Leaves in Ceramic Tea Cups”, two hundred eighty six pages long, as Corin checked immediately. It was beautiful – and exactly what he needed at the moment.





	Appealingly Boring

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another text I wrote for the Funfucktion contest but didn't finish and didn't send anywhere. I guess, a year later, its time has come.

Today’s Ultra Board Meeting was particularly intense, and Corin felt his cerebral gyri cramp spastically under the pressure that had been accumulating in his head for hours. The tension was slowly building into headache, dull and inescapable. He knew he needed to take his mind off things, to space out for a bit, but there was no way he wasn’t returning to his office. He still had work to do. A whole lot of work, and of exceptionally urgent and stressful kind, to boot. 

He wasn’t looking forward to it, honestly.

However, his return to the office wasn’t as dismal as he had thought it to be. There was a stack of paper on his desk. Quick examination revealed a pleasant surprise: it was a delivery from his favourite division, the Division of Incredibly Boring Things. A weighty dissertation on the topic “Comprehensive Analysis of the Factors Influencing the Spatial Distribution of Darjeeling Tea Leaves in Ceramic Tea Cups”, two hundred eighty six pages long, as Corin checked immediately. It was beautiful – and exactly what he needed at the moment.

Despite having work to do, he decided to take things slowly. Such treat required no rush. He let his eyes feast on the title page, which was, in fact, pretty standard; but its normativity was a virtue. His gaze skimmed over it without trying to get deeper; just a taste of its features, bringing comfort with their familiarity. The title was an uppercase promise, and Corin read it twice before turning the page over. He wanted to get to the table of contents, so he could see what he was dealing with, laid open in all its consolidated glory; but he took his time reading copyright information and acknowledgments. He didn’t learn anything meaningful about the dissertation, but he liked to start from the smaller stuff: just general information and some names of people he wasn’t acquainted with; those were unnecessary formalities, but a little bit of ceremoniality had ever hurt one only for exactly optimal amount. There was something soothing about them and about the ability to do things at his own pace. 

When he reached the table of contents, he has already been slightly underwhelmed, though not yet bored. It was still easy to concentrate on the words, and – 

Oh. 

Letters covered much more than a half of total available space, excluding margins. And the table of contents was so well-structured that it was just perfect.

However…

What _was_ that?

It had… not one, but _three_ appendices. And those were quite long ones! Corin had never seen such long appendices before, and he had seen a lot of various tail-pieces. He slid his finger between pages and thumbed through them, searching for the exact spot where the first appendix began. And there it was, filled up to the margins with monochromatic graphs and with digits so innumerable and so small that it would be hard even to identify the spatial correlation between them and corresponding visuals. 

Still, Corin traced those connections, one by one by one by one by one by one, with exactly the same result. He felt his sight gradually getting out of focus; his pulse beat slow and steady, and there was a new rhythm in his inhales and exhales. In the back of his mind, he noticed those changes; it was, probably, too forthright to start from one of the appendices. The first appendix felt so intensely boring, so straight-to-the-matter, that it didn’t make for a good prelude. Corin considered proceeding in a conventional way, step by step, internalizing the content as he was getting to it; it would feel so much better and even more sedating. Corin didn’t want to waste such a hefty and detailed work on a quick read. It could be so much more than that. 

So he left the first appendix to rest where it had been and returned to the table of contents. This time, he had to do it properly; so he started with the introduction. 

 

***

He was deep in the second chapter, being almost bored out of his mind but still not quite there, when he was interrupted. Helena's oddly intonated voice ripped him out of the pleasant haze that rendered him blind to the world around, and he looked up, visibly startled and unsure of his surrounding, so engrossed he was in his reading, so preoccupied with its delightful density that made him go over and over the same spots. 

"I found a security threat, Corin," she said, eyeing the sheaf of paper in front of him with suspicion; her optics always made her look like she was staring at everything through the сrosshairs and was about to use them for their intended purpose. 

"Th- the security threat?" Corin not-quite-gasped, still a bit numb from all the understimulation that his intense reading session provided to him. "What is it?"

"The Penis." He could swear he heard the capital P. "It tries to seize the power over the Division of Increasingly Improbable Slash Fiction."

Corin cursed under his breath; an image of a giant penis penetrated his mind, obtrusive and unwelcome. He wasn't prepared for that; his thoughts were still rigid and unresponsive, and bringing them into action again had to take some time. 

"I forgot that today is _the day_ ," he groaned. "I should take measures. Leaving a penis in the Division of Increasingly Improbable Slash Fiction unattended can prove disastrous. The penis is capable of transforming the Division of Increasingly Improbable Slash Fiction into the Division of Regular Slash Fiction, and we already have one. They will most definitely mind sharing their budget."

Helena blinked, her optics hidden behind nictitating membranes for a second and then staring their crosshair gaze the next. 

"Do you need my assistance, Corin," she said, not a single scintilla of quesitiveness in her voice. "I would love to render him incapable of such things."

Corin didn't doubt it for a minute (or any other timespan of a similar nature, for that matter), and he also didn't doubt that "rendering incapable" had an underlying implication of permanence. 

"No, your assistance is not required," hastily, he answered her non-question, feeling his state of pleasant numbness transform all the way to the state of much less pleasant alertness. "I will deal with this situation. This is my responsibility, after all. Dealing with penises. I mean, the ones running rampant and wreaking havoc. The useless, uncivilized, interfering with our work kind. I have nothing against the other, well-behaved ones. The ones, who don't vandalize my... _our_ workplace. Or people."

Helena proceeded to stare at him, but now her stare was less crosshair and more laser-aiming, and with high destructive power, to boot. 

"Okay," after a long, so very long and sweat-inducing pause, she enunciated, using quite plenty of vocal white noise for one short word. Then, she turned on her heels and marched out, leaving dents in the floor with every step. 

Corin heaved a deep sigh. The mood was ruined, and his afternoon headache was returning to torment him. So much for taking his mind off things. 

Wistfully, he looked at the "Comprehensive Analysis of the Factors...", still lying open on the table, with its complex words and streamlined graphs. So voluminous and so dense, the epitome of sophistication. So appealingly boring. 

Waiting for him. 

He turned his back to it. It wasn't easy, but he did it. 

He had so much work ahead of him. 

Why should it always be penises??


End file.
